To coincide with the International Day of Happiness, The United Nations have revealed their findings for the “World Happiness” report – a list of over 150 countries and how they’ve ranked in terms of happiness. The report measures “subjective well-being” and has been published for the last 5 years.
Once again, a selection of Nordic countries have dominated the top spots as they have done consistently since the start. However, Norway appears to have topped their Danish neighbours from the number one spot which they held last time.
2. Denmark
3. Iceland
4. Switzerland
5. Finland
7. Canada
8. New Zealand
9. Australia
10. Sweden
Norway – The happiest place in the world, apparently! (Image: Visit Norway)
As you can see, most of the top 10 are Western European countries, with the addition of Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The United States sits at 14, where the United Kingdom sits further down at 19. It’s the complete other end of the spectrum for sub-Saharan countries though, as well as places hit by conflict.
147. South Sudan
148. Liberia
149. Guinea
150. Togo
152. Syria
153. Tanzania
154. Burundi
155. Central African Republic
The amount of conflict in the Central African Republic probably has a lot to do with its happiness state. (Image: RP)
Syria being ranked near the lowest possible position probably comes as no surprise with the events going on there currently. The same goes with Yemen and South Sudan, as they are both facing impending famine. The country that scored the lowest though is the Central African Republic.
The result relies on asking 1000 people from each country to rate their quality of life on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best possible life for them and 0 being the worst possible life. Using the data from this, each country’s score was set an average. Norway’s result was 7.54, which was clearly the highest of all countries, where the Central African Republic’s was only 2.69.
Source: BBC